The
Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (known
in the Netherlands as Fonds BKVB) in Amsterdam is presenting the first
solo exhibition with several works by Simon Heijdens.

Spectacularly is the presence of 3, Rising Slowly, the chandelier which
Heijdens made last year for Swarovski Crystal Palace. It is the first
time that this work is exhibited outside the walls of Swarovski. The chandelier
has a traditional structure which moves by the wind outside of the building,
sometimes subtle, sometimes violent, sometimes not at all.

Fonds BKVB is the
national body responsible for making grants to individual visual artists,
designers and architects. Its objective is to nurture excellence in visual
arts, design and architecture in the Netherlands.

Inside
Out - Simon Heijdens

by Jonathan Bell 2007

In response to our world of dwindling greenery and densely-packed metropolises,
Dutch visual artist Simon Heijdens turns technology to aesthetic ends, creating
subtle ornamental works existing and evolving in response to their natural
surroundings. Jonathan Bell met him in London to talk ambient design and
technological ennui...
Simon Heijdens’s small East London studio is spotless, located in
a small mews close to Brick Lane, with worn but clean floorboards and two
desks and two computers. An abstract soundtrack of ambient clicks and beeps
plays in the background. The only evidence of work in progress are three
pieces of prototype ceramics on a sideboard, part of Heijdens’s Broken
White project. created in 2004 for Droog Design, Broken White encapsulates
the designer’s approach, an intriguing mix of analogue and digital
explorations into the relationship we have with objects and our surroundings,
By combining work that uses simple, apparently immutable materials like
ceramics with the unpredictable aesthetics of computer-generated graphics,
Heijdens reveals a fascination with the role objects play in our society,
and the ways in which our perception of them can be changed.
Having studied experimental film and product and media design at Design
Academy Eindhoven in
the Netherlands, Heijdens now finds himself one of the leading exponents
of what might loosely
be called ‘ambient design’ (Heijdens doesn’t like the
term ‘interactive’), Choosing to implement
technology in a more subtle way than his contemporaries he produces high-profile
works like 3, Rising Slowly, a chandelier designed for the Austrian company
Swarovski that are quietly integrated with their surroundings. In the case
of the chandelier, strands of threaded crystals are linked to an external
wind sensor, triggering a ripple through the threads that mimics exactly
the external conditions (which might not be immediately apparent to the
viewer) It becomes a living object, one that is constantly changing
Technology is not everything to Heijdens. ‘Sometimes it’s very
analogue, like the ceramics, other times it’s very technical, like
the Swarovski chandelier’ he says, describing how the Broken White
project attempts to undermine the fixed nature of the thing. ‘Why
are objects designed in such a static way?’ he asks. By doctoring
the glaze on the objects, Heijdens introduces a flaw that grows with time,
introducing decoration in a subtle and unconventional way through the small,
non-structural linesthe craquelure-that appear in the glaze, making them
appear more characterful and more delicate, mirroring the intense and complex
patterns on upscale ceramics. In this way, the user creates a dialogue with
the object. ‘I create a tension in the ceramics’ says Heijdens,
and it is tension that is the crucial element in his work; be it a sudden
movement or unexpected gradual metamorphosis.
Technology offers myriad ways of generating this feeling. ‘I did a
group of projects about trying to
introduce nature into artificial space,’ says Heijdens. ‘It
grew from my interest into how our daily surroundings become more and more
static - our lives are more and more in artificial spaces with no movement.’
The project entitled Tree is the best manifestation of the response to this
observation,
a computer-generated tree projected at roughly life-size onto the side of
a building (‘a fake forest
revealing real nature’). The piece is not site-specific, and has been
shown at numerous locations
around the wortd (multiple versions in New York are being presented In early
2007). The ‘Tree’ itself
is a computer graphic, ‘evolved’ rather than drawn, and responding
with subtlety to passing foot traffic
by shedding a leaf, for example, eventually forming a pattern of discarded
vegetation that swirls and
cascades realistically as pedestrians approach.
These objects are ‘open to their environment’, according to
Heijdens. The Lightweeds installation is his current concern, in the process
of being installed in the Erasmus MC Hospital in Rotterdam. A follow-up
to Tree, it uses a similar projection-system set-up but with for more sophisticated
software.
At Erasmus, walls are adorned with computer-generated ‘plants’,
a 2D representation of slowly
growing stalks and leaves that respond to data taken directly from the hospital
building itself-rainfall, wind speed, etc. ‘My hope is that it will
improve patients’lives,’ says Heijdens, adding that a hospital
is a strange place to be, so we are trying to introduce natural elements.
The Lightweeds are far more immersive; installed around the large campus,
they can be ‘pollinated’ by sensing movement from
one building to another, almost covertly tracing patterns of usage. Heijdens
likens this to the contrast between a ‘sand path and a paved road;
one shows a lot of information, the other none’.
At its core, Lightweeds is about ‘softening the skin of public space’.
Despite his background in film
studies, Heljdens eschews the term animator, stressing how the digital vegetation
with its hypnotic, waving movements is generated purely from data, providing
a theoretically infinite universe of possible forms, just as the ‘wind’
tugs at the branches of the Tree. ‘I don’t want to animate,
I want to make a project that is animated through its surroundings’
he says, describing the sterile architectural landscape of the Erasmus buildings,
symptomatic of the ever-more hermetic nature of modern life. Can the technology
that shrink-wraps us somehow be turned in on itself to provide natural,
evocative cues and imagery? These projects are also perfect for the public
realm. ‘It’sjust light, it’s very hard to break’
he says simply.
For now, these tense objects occupy galleries rather than stores. Does Heijdens
make a distinction between products and objects? ‘Everythlng can become
a product. The Mona Lisa is a highly exploited product, he begins, explaining
that in contrast any rock you find on the street can become a highly personal
object, Heijdens is right to give the user the ultimate responsibility as
to how they respond to objects and their surroundings,
‘I’m absolutely not interested in instant reaction and press
button interaction’ he says. The irony is
that we live in an age saturated with technological objects that profess
to synch with our lifestylesand
hence desires-the minute we get them out of the box. But with this highly
charged emotional
investment comes a new era of planned obsolescence: the IPod whose battery
fatally expires or the relentless feature creep of mobile phones.
Tackling the ennui caused by this technological overload has been Heijdens’s
concern since his student days. Moving Wallpaper (2002), his graduation
project at Eindhoven, was both the first salvo in his war on the flat, unresponsive
surface, and also a way of hooklng into flows and frictions that are already
there, a surface treated with a Polaroid-style pigment that allows for constant
variation of pattern and image, Moving Wallpaper paved the way for a viability
study with Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture then
working on a series of stores for Prada; this is a Pandora’s Box of
Innovation.
‘People start to realise the possibility of making static objects
like building façades Into things with
a character’ Heijdens enthuses, although he isn’t keen on the
idea of the shimmering, animated
cityscapes of science fiction poised to burst Into life; imagine a world
made up entirely of Piccadilly
Circuses. There is an irony in the way in which such considered, subtle
work that addresses the
crassness of consumerism might ultimately end up becoming a prime commercial
tool.
For now, these considerations are not foremost in Heijdens’s mind.
Aware that a technological
revolution is always just around the corner, especially in terms of the
affordability. of projection and computing equipment, he is content with
being a forerunner and not a progenitor of a new visual
culture. It is up to us to shape what comes next.